Ep 13 of 14: Another Body
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Penn State World Campus delivers on your time. Click the ad or visit worldcampus.psu.edu to learn more. This is episode 13, Another Body. At 6 o'clock on Wednesday, July 13th, 2016, New Orleans police officers were racing to a homicide scene in New Orleans East. A woman had been shot in the parking lot of the Mark 7 apartments and the shooter had just fled.

When authorities arrived, people who'd been hanging out around the apartments and the discount market next door were scrambling.

That's it's all man.

By 6.15 p.m., more police officers showed up and turned their body cameras on. The body of the young woman who'd been shot was laying out in the open for everyone to see. It took paramedics a few minutes to officially pronounce her dead.

The video and audio of that part of the investigation is pretty horrific and I don't want to go into detail about it. But all you need to know is that she was face down in the parking lot behind a dumpster, just a few yards from the door of the Mark 7 leasing office. What stuck out to me most was exactly what I just said, where she was killed. She was gunned down in the same spot Bruce Kuchera had been killed four years earlier.

Even though NOPD didn't allow me to personally view Bruce's crime scene photos, I feel confident based on everything I've gathered studying his case that where he was killed and where this young woman was killed are in fact the same parking space.

The glaring difference between his case and this woman's case is that in 2016, NOPD had way more help from residents of the complex. Detectives had multiple eyewitnesses come up to them and willingly provide great information.

I gave him the license plate number. It's a red SUV. The passenger rear window is busted out. You see the glass on the ground. That was from, I guess, when the bullets went through the window. So it was inside a car when it happened? Yeah. It's a red SUV? Yes. He went around and the gun was on the ground or something. He grabbed the gun and got back in the vehicle. I didn't see every one of them, but I'm thinking like four people.

Within a few hours of the young woman's murder, NOPD had identified her as 19-year-old Michelle Veresmende. She'd been shot four times with three different types of ammunition: .22 caliber, .45 caliber, and .38 caliber bullets.

They got a few shell casings. One. They're real small. Casing that one. Yeah, 22, two, three, four, five. Should be five.

The most helpful evidence of all was surveillance video from the apartment complex, which showed everyone who had come and gone from the parking lot from before, during, and after Michelle's murder. We have a better description of that wanted vehicle. It's a red GMC Arcadia, reddish maroon. The rear passenger window is broken.

A day after Michelle was killed, detectives determined the car the suspects had fled in was hers. The killers later set it on fire in another part of New Orleans East. A few days after that, investigators identified one of the prime suspects as 21-year-old Breonna Brown, a drug dealer who'd been texting and calling Michelle prior to the murder, and was someone Michelle had told her friends she'd stolen money from in order to support her heroin use.

The identity of the second suspect, who was only described as a black man, was still something police were working on. Within a month, investigators had raided Brianna's apartment in the French Quarter and found a firearm that NOPD ballistics matched to some of the spent ammo from the crime scene. It didn't take long before Brianna was in custody and Michelle's case was on the path to prosecution.

Someone who volunteered to help authorities from the start was Michelle's close friend, Ale Jester. Ale was the last person to see Michelle alive before the two parted ways hours before the killing. She actually came over that morning. I was going through some things and so she was, she came in, climbed into bed. We were watching music videos and whatever and she was just letting me vent about my problems. She didn't say anything to me about what was going on with her.

Ale said mostly what Michelle talked about was her desire to get clean from heroin and turn her life around. She was like, I'm going to move home. I'm going to switch schools. She was going to hair school. I'm going to switch to the veterinary one. I'm going to move back in with my parents. And she always said, I'm not going to move back in with my parents unless I know I won't let them down this time. So her saying that was like, it really solidified to me like she means it. She means it this time.

According to Aile, the only thing Michelle needed to do before going home to Baton Rouge was settle her debts with Breonna Brown. She was dealing Michelle heroin, but she also dealt cocaine and weed. She actually was planning on paying them back for what she took and just clean slate. Unfortunately, that wasn't what Breonna and the guy who was with her had in mind for Michelle.

I don't think that there was a price that she could have paid in their eyes other than with her life for ripping them off. It just didn't feel real for a really long time. I think it didn't really sink in, sink in until the trial. According to court records, Breonna Brown was charged with second-degree murder for her part in Michelle's death. But when her trial wrapped up two years later in 2018, she was convicted of a lesser charge of manslaughter.

During her trial, she claimed she'd only been present for Michelle's murder, not the person who pulled the trigger. Despite admitting a few key details, Brianna never revealed the true identity of the man who'd been with her. She only referred to him by the names Lil Mike or Mike White. She said he chose the location of where to kill Michelle, and he brought the murder weapons, which she said included a revolver.

She was very comfortable being like, "It wasn't at all me. It was all Mike White." It made me seem like that's a fake name, that it was someone else. I know that whoever Michelle was meeting up with was someone that Bre considered like a brother. So honestly, the way that the police have never been able to find this other guy, the way nothing ever came of it, I thought it was a fake name.

A judge eventually sentenced Breonna to 30 years in prison, but in 2021, she was let out early on bond because a Louisiana appeals court overturned her conviction. The court ruled that because her jury had not unanimously agreed on a guilty verdict, she was free to go until the state sought a new trial.

In a twist of fate, one month after being released from prison, Brianna and her brother were gunned down in a drive-by shooting at an apartment complex in New Orleans East, just a few minutes away from the Mark 7 apartments. Their hitman was later killed while awaiting trial by none other than Brianna's father. Yeah, I know, this chain of street justice will make your head spin.

Ale Jester, Michelle's good friend, thinks all the death that surrounded Brianna definitely links back to whoever Lil Mike is. No one was ever able to find that other person. And then when she got out of prison on a technicality, she was murdered in the same fashion. And I mean, that said a lot. That spoke a lot to me. Whoever else was involved doesn't want anyone else to know about it.

I see their point. I mean, clearly someone didn't want Brianna to live to see another trial. But whether that person was Lil Mike or someone else who had beef with Brianna and her family, I don't know. And I'm not sure it's possible we'll ever know. My more pressing question is, could Lil Mike be connected to Bruce's murder in any way? Let's go over what we know about him.

1. According to Breonna Brown, a convicted killer slash eventual murder victim, Lil Mike chose the Mark 7 apartments as the place to kill Michelle. 2. He used a revolver that may have been the same caliber as the revolver NOPD believes was used to kill Bruce, a .38. 3. The guns used in Michelle's case were recovered by NOPD. 4.

And four, someone has gone through a lot of trouble to make sure his real name is never known. That's it. That's what we know. Which to me, feels thin if we're going to consider a scenario where he is the shooter and involved in both murders. I have zero proof that the same firearms or even ammunition were used in both crimes. But to me, that feels like an easy thing that NOPD could rule out if they just compared the case evidence.

During my interview with Al Jester, they say they're not sure there's a connection, despite there being odd similarities and a short amount of time between the two crimes. The coincidence is very crazy, but I mean, there's so much crime in this state, honestly. Baton Rouge and New Orleans said, no, it's not terribly surprising, but for it being such a close space that it's the same area that their bodies were laying, that's difficult.

Caitlin Picou, Bruce's daughter, never knew about Michelle's murder. But when I told her everything I'd found out, she agreed that at the very least, the similarities between the two cases made her curious. It's just weird to me that they would pick that spot. Like, that's just an odd place. Maybe this person knows who did it or knows of the situation and was like, this is where you can go. Like, why do you pick that place?

"Is it because you know that, one, someone's gotten away with murder there? Have you been part of that murder to know, like, what was going on? Like, who knows?" More than anything, she wishes the surveillance cameras at the Mark 7 apartments had been working on the day her dad was killed. But they weren't, which is clearly a huge factor in why Michelle's case was solved so quickly, but Bruce's hasn't been.

When I really got to thinking about the cameras not working though, I realized maybe I wasn't asking enough questions. Because if I've learned anything while investigating Bruce's case, it's that you can't always take what you're told at face value. There's always one more person worth comparing information with. Did you work at that store prior to 2016, like in 2012 by any chance? Uh, yeah.

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In July 2016, an NOPD officer investigating Michelle Veresmenday's murder spoke with a witness who claimed to have surveillance footage of her killers fleeing the parking lot of the Mark 7 apartments. I was about to get off, but I reported a little bit on the video. How about your email? This witness told the officer his name, but for his safety, I'm going to leave it out and just call him Pete. Pete worked as a clerk at Chef's Discount Market next door.

He didn't want anyone in the neighborhood to see him talking to police. So he was whispering his information through the wooden fence that separated the store's property from the Mark 7 parking lot. The officer gave Pete's information to his superiors. He said they got some video of the other side of the vehicle leaving.

He's leaving now, but he gave his telephone number. When detectives hurried over and looked at the store's footage, they cleaned up the bolo they'd sent out about Michelle's suspects and radioed this message to every NOPD officer working in the city. We have a better description of that wanted vehicle. It's a red GMC Arcadia, reddish maroon. The rear passenger window is broken.

The clerk's tip in the footage from the market gave police a critical angle of Michelle's killers getting away, and ultimately was used as evidence in Breonna Brown's trial. Unfortunately, copies of that video were no longer available for me to request, so I went for the next best thing, Pete.

You see, back in 2016, when he was whispering through the fence, Pete gave the officer his real name, phone number, and email. So I called him, hoping his number still worked. Hi, I was looking for...

Success. The man confirmed for me that he was the clerk on duty at Chef's Discount Market on July 13th, 2016. And he believed he was also working on April 24th, 2012, too, when Bruce was killed. Were you working on the day that Bruce Cacero was killed in 2012? What do you remember about that, if anything?

Yeah, do you remember ever the police coming by and asking for surveillance video related to that shooting at all? Strange, right? Pete says the convenience store definitely had operable cameras in 2012, but he doesn't remember NOPD ever asking him to pull the tapes for Bruce's investigation.

Later in our interview, though, he walked that statement back and said it's possible police did come by the store in 2012, but he just doesn't remember it well or was taking his break. Caitlin told me, though, that NOPD has always said no surveillance video was available in her dad's case. Ryan Oakland also confirmed that when I talked to him for this show.

So, I don't know if the original detective in Bruce's case, Orlando Matthews, just didn't think to ask the store to check their footage in 2012, or he did, but the cameras just didn't capture anything useful. Or there's a third scenario, one that brings into question chain of custody, but that would take us down a dark, speculative path I don't want to traverse.

When I've spoken on the phone with Orlando, he says he doesn't remember what he did in 2012, which again is super unhelpful. Caitlyn thinks the fact that no video from the store ever surfaced wasn't because it didn't exist. She thinks NOPD just missed it.

How did y'all utilize the surveillance from the gas station and you didn't do that in my dad's case? Is it just that bad of police work? Is it that bad to where one, I mean, I know it was two different detectives, but why does one get the surveillance and the other person doesn't? Unfortunately, there's no way to rewind to 2012 and check the store's security cameras. Pete says any footage that far back is long gone.

Where this leaves me is disappointed. Disappointed for Bruce's family, who may not have gotten an attentive investigation from day one back in 2012. But I'm also disturbed. Disturbed that Michelle Veresmende's loved ones and friends never got closure either. Why murdered? Why murdered? That's not the shot that I thought was going to take her from me. At her funeral, the pastor...

He described her as everybody's crush, and that's so true. Anyone that met her was just like, I'm in love with her. She's so sweet and so funny. She was constantly giggling, constantly making new friends, constantly falling in and out of love, constantly making people fall in love with her. She made you feel important and worthy of being loved and made you feel like you were her family too.

She just loved everybody. She just got along with everybody. And it was an honor to know her and to love her. Despite Breonna Brown's conviction, her accomplice, Lil Mike, has never been caught. He's still out there somewhere. And because of that, Ale Jester feels a sense of injustice they'll never get over. I know that there was two people involved. I thought that someone...

Going to jail would give me peace and it didn't. I just watched another family get wrecked. As interesting as the similarities between Michelle and Bruce's murders are, I can't help but keep coming back to where the majority of the evidence in this case points. And that's that someone close to Bruce knows more than they're saying.

Somewhere in the litigation, conversations, and investigations surrounding his life might be the clue to identifying his killer. And Detective Brian O'Quinn agrees. ♪

Do you think that there's individuals that may have information that are afraid to come forward? I do. I think so. I mean, Mr. Kuchera lived in a high-stakes world where a lot of money was made and a lot of money was lost. And you make a lot of powerful friends. You make a lot of powerful enemies. I think it's a really good chance that...

somebody in his inner circle knows what happened and maybe thinks that what they know can't prove, but we don't know until we hear that information. So who are some of the people in Bruce's inner circle we haven't already addressed? And why don't they publicly talk about Bruce? Like, who doesn't want to help if it's your friend talk with the cops if you're innocent about solving this murder?

The investigation by no means is over. Definitely need to do some more interviewing or re-interviewing of individuals. I was told that I should hush my mouth, you know, from other people and just be quiet. But, you know, Bruce is a dear friend. I'm not letting a bunch of bullies keep me quiet. I know if someone's hiding that, it's not healthy for them or anyone. That's all coming up on the season finale of CounterClock, episode 14.

Friends or foes? Listen right now.

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